Composite components (or materials) are generally made from two or more constituent materials with significantly different physical or chemical properties. When combined, they produce a component with characteristics different from the individual materials, with the aim of using the benefit of both.
When manufacturing composite components using a manufacturing process such as Automated Fiber Placement (AFP) or Automated Tape Layering (ATL), inspecting the dimensional requirements of the manufactured components is an important part of the manufacturing process.
Known methods for performing dimensional inspection involve gathering data via manual inspection using a hand-held laser tracker, and having an operator compare the measured data with theoretical data from a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) file. In the case of a composite component having many plies, manual inspection of the fibers of each ply of the component is extremely time consuming. Another shortcoming of manual inspection is that it is dependent on the hand and eye skills of the operator, which makes it harder to validate the inspection at a later time.
There is therefore a need to improve the inspection phase of the manufacturing process for certain components.